I don't for a moment kid myself that we could have wiped out the taliban or fundamentalism in Afghanistan, but we could certainly have made things a lot better in the country. If we had helped improve the country enough we could have kept it from becoming the world's leading opium exporter and raised the standard of living enough so that the people would have rejected the taliban.

I know our troops and the NATO troops are doing more than hunting taliban. It's just that we could have done so much more with a fraction of the resources wasted on Iraq.